Линда Нагата - Edges

To learn what he could of it, that was the task Riffan had been given, whether by his own heritage or by the inscrutable will of the Unknown God. However long and hard and monotonous and lonely his studies might be, inevitably they revealed yet one more detail behind the machinery of existence, and that was reason enough to have made the leap to Dragon , despite what he’d left behind.

He drew a deep breath. “You’ll do just fine,” he assured himself. And then a cynical chuckle, “Or die trying.”

Urban replicated his ghost, once again splitting his timeline.

There was a lottery in each replication. At that moment, he became himself and someone else. Their points of view divergent. Their futures different.

As himself, he would stay behind aboard Dragon , while that other version uploaded to Elepaio , the outrider he’d chosen for this mission. That ghost would command the little ship, taking it as close as good judgment allowed to the site of the beacon.

He swore softly, indulging in disappointment, because he was the version who would stay behind. But if his ghost returned, the memories of both timelines would belong to him and he would have both gone and stayed.

Many hours later, a message came in from Elepaio , relayed through Lam Lha and Artemis . It confirmed his ghost and Riffan’s had reached the outrider, and included the precise time Elepaio had departed, breaking away from the communications network that linked the fleet.

Urban knew the outrider’s planned course. He could calculate its position. But its dark hull and minimal heat signature meant he could not see it, and it was too far away for the lateral lines of Dragon ’s gravitational sensor to detect its propulsion reef. With Elepaio out of the communications network, he had no way to confirm its actual position. The little ship had become invisible to Dragon ’s senses. His senses.

It was a stark reminder of how easily dark, quiet, cool objects could disappear in the great empty. An unneeded reminder. Urban kept a constant watch, ever alert to the possibility of a hostile vessel coasting unseen to well within weapons range.

Radar could map the space around him, but it would slide off the hull of a fully stealthed attacker. And using radar would expose Dragon ’s position when he wanted to stay hidden.

So he used passive detection. A nearby object would eclipse background stars. He watched for that. And he was alert for gravitational anomalies—but he detected none.

Time passed. Three hundred twenty-one days.

Then a DI brought him a report gleaned from the newest astronomical records. A faint point of white light had been observed behind Dragon , where no light had been seen before. Its spectral signature confirmed its identity as a Chenzeme warship.

At last, Urban had found his long-sought prey.

Clemantine’s archived ghost winked into awareness. She noted the time. Nearly a year since Elepaio ’s departure. A submind dropped in. It updated her with startling news:

The hunt was on!

Centuries had elapsed since Urban declared his intention to seek a Chenzeme courser. Centuries since Clemantine had given cold approval to the project, persuaded to it by her hatred, by a hunger to strike back at last against the Chenzeme killing machines.

In all that time, no courser or swan burster had ever been sighted. Clemantine had worried the warships were limited in their territory, that Dragon had passed beyond the region where they might be found. But here at last, the quarry.

And because she’d been archived for most of the intervening years, her passion for the hunt had not decayed.

She transited to the library.

Urban was already there, engrossed in a three-dimensional map of the Near Vicinity, the Pilot and the Bio-mechanic facing him on the map’s opposite side, confined in their frameless windows.

Clemantine scanned the map. Dragon was at its center. The beacon bleated ahead and to the left. The newly discovered courser, represented as a white point and tagged with a label that read Target 3 , was surprisingly close behind.

The only reason she did not feel her heart race, her skin crawl, her stomach clench in revulsion at the proximity of the deadly machine, was because such responses did not exist within the architecture of a ghost.

“Not yet in weapons range,” she observed.

“But close,” the Pilot said.

Urban looked up as Kona popped into existence beside him. Vytet and Riffan followed. Riffan enveloped himself in a simulated bubble of modified gravity that allowed him to sit cross-legged, while floating at head height. He and Vytet and Kona had all lived a physical existence since Elepaio ’s departure. Only Clemantine had skipped that year.

“There it is,” Kona said grimly, staring at the tagged point. “Our curse and our salvation.” Reflected in his gaze, the memory of apocalypse. Clemantine shared that memory, and she carried other memories—other scars—gained on the Null Boundary Expedition.

Kona turned to Urban. “This isn’t chance. It was following us, wasn’t it?”

“Sooth,” Urban agreed. “It would have been stealthed, dark, trying to gauge our strength and judge whether our behavior falls within Chenzeme norms.”

“The presence of the outriders might have made us look questionable,” Riffan mused, his voice breathy with tension even though ghosts did not breathe.

“It would have studied the outriders,” Urban agreed. “But Chenzeme ships have used many different strategies, including ancillary ships. Dragon understood the concept from the beginning.”

“We went dark less than two years ago,” Kona said. “Maybe it lost track of us, decided to reveal itself, to see if we’d do the same.”

“Maybe,” Urban said. “But two years is no time at all to a Chenzeme mind. I think it heard the beacon. Its internal pilot wouldn’t know how to respond to an anomaly like that, so it woke the philosopher cells.”

The calm tone of this discussion felt increasingly surreal to Clemantine. As a ghost, her emotions were muted. Even so, it took effort to resist a rising anger, an impatience to get on with it. In her mind, this courser stood for all those coursers that had pursued and destroyed human ships, and ravaged human worlds. Now it had become their prey and she was eager to go after it.

Urban went on, thinking aloud. “My guess: those cells will respond like Dragon ’s. They’ll quickly reach a consensus to attack the beacon.”

“Despite our presence?” Vytet asked quietly. He had assumed a masculine aspect again, this time with dark-brown skin and a flat face. He wore his hair long, tied at the nape, and he looked out on the world from beneath heavy black eyebrows. Even stranger, he had indulged in the outlandish, ancient affectation of a closely trimmed beard. Sitting on a plinth summoned from the library’s floor and staring pensively at the display, he looked like an ancient sage in some historical drama.

“Does it even know where we are?” Riffan wondered. He looked just the same, masculine and moderately handsome, with a bright, interested expression. “Our course adjustment came after the hull cells went dark.”

“It may not know,” Urban acknowledged, “but it will expect us to join in the hunt.”

Clemantine gave him a sharp look. “We’re not going to do that.”

“No,” he agreed.

“We could stay dark,” Kona suggested. “Hang back and watch. See what happens if it attacks the beacon.”